CARMELO TO CHALLENGE MICHAELSON
State Assemblyman Albert Carmelo (D-Berkeley) announced today that he would seek the Congressional seat now held by Republican Dwayne Michaelson. “Berkeley has a long Democratic tradition,” Carmelo declared, “and without Presidential coattails to help my opponent this time around, I feel confident that I have a good chance of unseating him.”
—Oakland Express
XVIII
In Robert Reed’s junior year at UC Berkeley, Nat Wolfowitz decided to run for Congress. He announced this in the middle of a poker game, right after he had raked in a pot at seven-card stud with nothing better than tens and sixes.
“You’re out of your mind, Nat,” Bobby told him. “You’d be lucky to carry Telegraph Avenue.”
“I bluffed you out of this one on the sixth card with nothing but a lousy pair of sixes showing, didn’t I?” Wolfowitz said.
“That’s not exactly the same thing!”
“Isn’t it?”
“Come on, Nat, you’re not really serious!” Marla Washington said.
She was the only person in the game who had been living at Little Moscow when Bobby had arrived in Berkeley, and she had never been too terrific at poker. The other two hands, Johnny Nash and Frieda Blackwelder, were relative newcomers whose skill did not at all match their enthusiasm, and while Bobby was still no match for Wolfowitz, and knew he never would be, he had long since learned that by playing defensive poker behind Nat and not getting greedy, he could win modest amounts more or less consistently enough to augment the modest living allowance he was getting from his parents in Paris.
“Depends on what you mean by serious,” Wolfowitz said. “It’s not as if I expect to win.”
“Huh?”
“Of course I don’t have a chance of winning,” Nat said blithely. “The district takes in a big chunk of Oakland as well as Berkeley, the whole economy is dependent on the Navy Yard, even Berkeley is more Gringo than Red, most people are not gonna like what I’m saying at all, and even if the Democrats and Republicans split right down the middle, I don’t have a prayer of sneaking in.”
He laughed. “Who the hell wants to live in Washington anyway?”
It was Bobby’s deal. “Straight draw,” he declared cautiously, not wanting to deal with anything more complicated while Nat was running this little psyche-out. If that was really what it was. Nat had the strangest look on his face, devilish and ironic, yes, but also somehow dreamy and faraway. He couldn’t really be serious, could he . . . ?
“Come on, Nat, what are you really up to?” Bobby said as he dealt the cards.
“Teddy Roosevelt, Jesse Jackson,” Wolfowitz said. “Writ small.”
“What are you babbling about?” Marla said.
“Was Teddy Roosevelt who called the Presidency a bully pulpit,” Wolfowitz said. “Jesse Jackson was this radical black preacher back in the 1980s and ’90s who kept running for President over and over again even though he knew he had no chance of winning.”
Bobby checked his cards. King high, without even a pair or a three-card flush. “Because running for President was also a bully pulpit?” he said.
Frieda checked. Johnny bet fifty dollars. Marla raised fifty. Wolfowitz glanced at his cards and folded. Bobby locked eyes with him for a moment and then dropped out too. Frieda called. Johnny called.
Wolfowitz beamed at him. “You’re getting it, kid,” he said.
Frieda took one card, probably pulling to a straight or a flush. Johnny took three, probably holding a pair. Marla took two, three of a kind, no doubt.
Bobby lost interest in the hand as they bet and raised each other, and so did Nat Wolfowitz. “I’ve won enough in the big games to finance a couple thousand posters, a few radio spots maybe, and we could start charging a few bucks’ admission to the Saturday night parties. Enough to generate a little free press coverage, if I keep saying the same outrageous thing.”
“Which is?”
“The United States has to do whatever it takes to get into Common Europe,” Wolfowitz said.
Marla looked up from her hand. “That’s crazy, Nat!” she said.
“We all know that it’s true,” Wolfowitz said.
“Yeah, but we’re a bunch of Reds!”
“Bet, will you, Marla!”
“Yeah, play poker?”
“Uh . . . call . . . ,” Marla said distractedly, shoving another fifty into the pot.
“What about you, Comrade Eurocrat?” Wolfowitz asked Bobby. “Does it look so crazy from your perspective?”
Bobby, by now, was one of the senior members of Little Moscow, and his European background gave him a certain intellectual cachet. So he felt that he really had to say something intelligent; it was necessary to his mystique.
The so-called Western Hemispheric Common Market gave America an enormous captive market and raw materials at artificially depressed prices. But this kept Latin America impoverished, and with the United States frozen out of Greater Common Europe, Africa a basket case, and the Japanese pretty much in control of Asian markets, Latin America was the only export market America had.
The endless guerrilla wars all over the hemisphere kept the American defense industry humming and unemployment at a politically tolerable level. But, having stiffed Common Europe, the United States had firmly established itself as an international deadbeat, leaving no way to finance deficits overseas.
Domestic spending had to be cut to the bone, but the federal budget still ran a deficit, which meant floating rubbery paper inside the United States, which meant high interest rates, which meant inflation, which meant higher interest rates, which meant more inflation . . .
The only things that kept the economy from collapsing were cheap raw materials from Latin America, cheap food prices generated by unexportable surpluses, and government pressure to keep wage increases below the inflation rate and profit margins above the prevailing interest rates.
So the standard of living kept drifting downward, but not dramatically enough to rock the slowly sinking boat. Especially with Europe and Japan and guerrillas in Latin America to blame for the American people’s misfortune and the ever-tightening strictures of the constantly amended National Security Act to silence anyone unpatriotic enough to voice the awful truth.
“Sure, Nat, we all know that getting into Common Europe is the only way out,” Bobby finally said. “But how? They won’t even let in our exports. How do you propose to get them to even think about letting us join?”
Marla turned up three eights. Johnny and Frieda groaned as she raked in the pot.
“Pay them back what we owe them,” Wolfowitz said.
“You’re talking about trillions and trillions of dollars!” Bobby exclaimed.
Wolfowitz took the cards. It was his deal. He cut the deck and began shuffling the cards with his usual gambler’s flourish. “It’d be an offer they couldn’t refuse,” he said.
“Yeah, sure, but where would we get the ante?” Bobby replied. “And even if we could, how on earth would you sell such a thing to an electorate of Peen-hating jingos?”
Wolfowitz shrugged. “I haven’t figured that one out yet,” he admitted. “But then, I’m not going to be elected, so I don’t have to worry about such petty details, now do I?” he said. “All I want to do is to force people to at least start talking about it.”
“The bully pulpit? Bully-shit, you ask me!”
Wolfowitz shrugged again. “How does that make me any worse than the Democrats and the Republicans?” he said. “Seven-card stud, suckers, the ante in this game is only fifty dollars, so pony up, surely you guys can come up with that much somehow!”
Wolfowitz kicked off his campaign with a big Saturday night party. Bobby and the other inhabitants of Little Moscow pasted posters up all over Telegraph Avenue and the campus, and Wolfowitz mailed out a press release that got him a short item in the college paper and a brief mention on one FM radio station. “Nathan Wolfowitz for Congress—Now Is the Time for a Futile Gesture,” the slogan went.
It was hard for Bobby to take the whole thing seriously, but much to his surprise, the house was jammed to the rafters by nine o’clock Saturday night, with people spilling out onto the front porch, the lawn, even the junk-strewn backyard, despite the chill fog rolling in off the bay. Wolfowitz had decided against charging admission, at least for tonight, in order to maximize the crowd, but he had Bobby and the others going around with bowls and baskets and hats to solicit contributions, and amazingly enough, in small bits and pieces, the money came pouring in.
It was too much of a mob scene for Nat to do anything like make a big speech, but that would have been redundant anyway, Bobby realized after an hour or so of listening to snatches of conversation while he passed the hat.
The Reds of Berkeley, those of them who still dared to show their true colors and risk the wrath of the Gringos who had ruled the streets ever since the night of the infamous Flag Riot, were longing for something like this. It could have been Wolfowitz or it could have been anybody. Now indeed was the time for a futile gesture, as far as the Reds of Berkeley were concerned, and futile or not, Bobby had not seen such political energy and even crazy hope since the annexation of Baja.
Bobby kept having to empty his hat onto the ever-growing pile of small bills and coins on Wolfowitz’s bed, and his pockets were stuffed with bits of paper scrawled with the names and telephone numbers of people eager to work in the campaign.
It was exhilarating to be sure, at the very least it made for one hell of a party, and some of the phone numbers in his pockets were those of interesting girls who had already been impressed by his residency at Little Moscow, his European background, and his proximity to Nat.
But he also found it all rather disturbing. All these people, all this money, all that energy, all that hope, and the truth of it was that Nat Wolfowitz didn’t have a ghost of a chance of being elected to Congress, or even dogcatcher for that matter, even in Berkeley. That all these people had managed to convince themselves that it was possible, that they were willing to invest their time and even their money in the “Futile Gesture,” well maybe that wasn’t so bad, it gave them hope, direction, something to do that could make them feel they were really accomplishing something.
What really troubled Bobby was that Nat himself didn’t even pretend to believe it. He went around talking about getting the United States into Common Europe and the need for an “American Gorbachev,” namely himself, and all the while openly calling the whole thing a futile gesture. Yet he did it with the sly grin he always used to convince the marks that the garbage he seemed to be holding was going to be the winning hand when he turned up his hole cards.
But Bobby knew damn well that in this game, Nat had nothing better than a four-card flush in his hand, and there was something about that that made him seem like, well, like something of a four-flusher.
“You’re Bobby Reed, aren’t you?” a girl said as she dropped a bill in his hat as he was making his way down the hall to the staircase to dump another full load on Wolfowitz’s bed.
She was of medium height with short straight mousy brown hair, and she was wearing a bulky blue sweater and a long loose red denim skirt that gave little indication of what might lie beneath. But there was something about her face . . .
“The one and only,” Bobby admitted.
“The guy who moved here from France . . .”
“Bien sûr,” Bobby drawled.
There was a sparkle of intensity in her green eyes that was almost frightening. She had a cute little snub nose like a cartoon rendering of the all-American college girl, but the line of her mouth seemed about ten years older and harder. For the life of him, Bobby couldn’t figure why, but it was turn-on at first sight.
“The world-famous froggy make-out artiste?” she snapped, her face suddenly becoming a mask of anger. “You think you’re gonna talk yourself inside my pants with your suave European sophistication?”
“What . . . ?” Bobby stammered.
“Nosey-josey, don’t go getting the wrong idea,” she said, as she handed him a crumpled piece of paper. “I want very badly to work in this campaign, but not badly enough to become another notch for you to cut into your dork.”
“If I’m such a notorious lady-killer, where do you come off believing I’d be interested in the likes of you?” Bobby snapped back.
She suddenly underwent another instant transformation. “Hey, come on, where’s your Gallic sophistication?” she said with a sly little smile. “Don’t you know when someone’s putting you on?”
“Huh?”
“Not that you don’t have quite a reputation. You think you can go around screwing half the women in Berkeley without the rest of us knowing your line and the length of your prick down to the millimeter?”
Bobby felt himself blushing scarlet. His head was reeling. Yet somehow he found himself becoming more and more entranced.
“What’s your name, anyway?” he demanded.
“Sara Conner.”
“Well, look, Sara Conner,” Bobby snapped, “if you’re really serious about working in this campaign, then you’d better learn some manners, I mean, all we need is someone who thinks it’s cute to insult people she’s never even met.”
Sara Conner’s demeanor changed yet again. “Hey, I’m sorry,” she said, with what seemed like genuine sincerity. “Really. I just wanted to see how you’d react. Maybe I got carried away a little, people do tell me I come on a little strong—”
“That I can believe—”
“—but I really do want very much to work for the Wolfowitz campaign, so please, please, have a sense of humor, and don’t hold it against me.”
And she stood there looking all nervous and eager with a pleading expression on her face.
“Maybe we should start this conversation over?” Bobby suggested. “Come on upstairs with me, and—”
“To your bedroom?”
Bobby rolled his eyes upward. “To Nat’s room!” he groaned. “I’ve got to empty this hat so I can come back for more!”
Sara laughed, and this time Bobby, beginning to catch on, managed to laugh with her.
Sara’s eyes widened when she saw the pile of money on Wolfowitz’s bed. “Wow,” she said, “this is really serious funding!”
Bobby dumped his hatful of money on the pile. “Not really as much as it looks, just a big pile of small bills,” he said, staring at the money, at the concrete evidence of all those vain hopes downstairs. At the moment, it reminded him of nothing so much as another poker pot that Nat was raking in with a hand that no one had been willing to pay to see.
“What’s the matter?” Sara said, apparently sensing his mood.
Bobby sighed. He sat down on the edge of the bed. “Nat’s a good friend of mine, and I’m certainly not saying that all this is a con, but . . .” He shrugged. “You really don’t think he has a chance of winning?”
“No. So?”
“So?” Bobby exclaimed, waving a hand over the untidy heap of money. “So this!”
“You think he’s going to keep the money?”
“Of course not. He’ll spend every dollar of it, and probably all his poker winnings besides, but—”
“But what?”
“But he can’t win! He knows he can’t win! It’s just not right!”
“I know he can’t win and some of that money is mine,” Sara said. “You know he can’t win and yet you’ve spent all night collecting it.”
“And not feeling too terrific about it,” Bobby admitted. “I mean, look at it, a huge pile of loose change we’ve bullshitted out of hundreds of people. It’s not so much the money, it’s . . . it’s . . . it’s the emotional con job, the damn futility of it all. . . .”
“You have a conscience!” Sara exclaimed.
“Is that supposed to be another insult?” Bobby muttered sourly.
“No, no,” Sara said quite earnestly, sitting down on the bed beside him as if to prove it. “I understand how you feel, and it’s really quite . . . commendable. But you’ve got it all wrong.”
“I do?”
Sara bobbed her head up and down. “All wrong,” she said. “Nobody’s bullshitting anyone. I know Wolfowitz is not going to win, most of the people who’ve tossed their money on this pile know he’s not going to win, hell, he knows he’s not going to win, and he admits it openly. It’s not winning the election, it’s—”
“Oh no, please don’t say it’s how you play the game!”
Sara did not laugh. “It’s changing the game!” she declared passionately. “Back in the days of Thomas Jefferson, there was one party called the Democratic Republicans, and now it’s all come full circle, there hasn’t been a meaningful election in this country since before we were born. The Democrats say ‘so’s your mother,’ and the Republicans say ‘you’re another,’ and they both agree not to bother anyone with the real issues, because they’re both really the same, and every two years one team or the other wins the pennant and nothing changes and the country keeps sliding down, and even people who can see what’s happening don’t do anything, because the way the game’s set up, they don’t see anything they can possibly do . . .”
Bobby stared into the depths of her fiery green eyes in amazement. She was hunched over, positively vibrating, her hands balled into fists. He was taken aback, entranced.
“Don’t you see, Nathan Wolfowitz is out to change all that! He’s saying the unsayable. They’re gonna call him a Commie and a Peen-lover and a traitor, and he’s going to lose. But while they’re calling him names, they’re gonna be forced to talk about what he’s talking about to do it. He’s going to be news, at least in the Bay Area. He’s going to lose big, but he’s going to lose loud! And all the louder because he’s shouting into a vacuum.”
“So what?” Bobby said. “Berkeley Red Runs for Congress! Man Bites Dog! Pig Farmer Kidnapped by Flying Saucer!”
Sara shook her head. “You know what the significant thing is about a talking dog, Bobby?” she said.
Bobby cocked an inquisitive eyebrow.
“Not how well it talks, but that it’s talking at all!”
Bobby laughed. He found himself leaning closer. Sara didn’t even seem to notice.
“Now is the time for a futile gesture!” she said. “My great-grandfather was an IRA terrorist. My grandmother was one of the people who managed not to get hit when the National Guard started shooting at students at Kent State. My grandfather was a goddamn Weatherman! And even if my father is an insurance salesman and my mother a kindergarten teacher, I’ve got a long heritage of futile gestures to uphold.”
“You’re talking about revolution?” Bobby exclaimed. “Bombs and assassinations and riots in the street?”
“I’m talking about doing something! Anything, win or lose! Acting on what I believe in, instead of just sitting on my ass talking about it! That’s why I want to work for Wolfowitz. That’s why there’s all this money lying on this bed. People here want to do something! Don’t you understand that, Bobby Reed? Don’t you feel it? Haven’t you ever wanted to do something like that yourself?”
Bobby found himself forced to really think about it, as much by the passion of Sara Conner’s convictions as by the logic of her words. He thought about his boyhood dreams of America. About his long campaign to get here. And about how ruthlessly he had fought to stay. He remembered sitting in the living room here the night of the Flag Riot, watching it all on TV. And he remembered remembering in that moment another riot, in Paris, and an American Embassy smeared with blood and shit.
And finally he remembered the words he had said when all eyes were upon him that night, even as Sara Conner’s eyes were measuring him now.
I only wish I had been out there with them marching behind that flag. The goddamn jingos may have smeared blood and shit all over our flag, but when those people hung it upside down and marched up Telegraph behind it, they washed it clean, they made it something to be proud of again. They showed the world that there are still some real Americans.
And he had stayed. He had stayed in the States to do he knew not what. And he hadn’t left since for fear they would never let him back in. He had been a real American himself that night, but what had he done since? What had anyone done but bitch and moan and complain?
Those had indeed been real Americans out there behind that upside-down flag, making their futile but necessary gesture, and he understood that better now than he ever had before. Those were real Americans, and they had made him proud, given him a moment of courage.
And the girl sitting beside him on the bed heaped with money was surely another. And so, somehow, had she.
“Yeah,” he said quietly, “I have wanted to. Thanks for reminding me.”
Sara Conner smiled at him for the first time, a little soft smile, but in Bobby’s eyes it was radiant. “It’s Wolfowitz we should both be thanking for giving us the chance to try,” she said.
Bobby wanted to gather her up in his arms and have her right there atop Nat’s campaign funds. But he knew better than to try. “I guess I’d better get back to passing the hat, then,” he said instead.
He picked up his empty hat, stood up, extended a hand. She took it and let him help her to her feet. At least that was something.
“Uh . . . can I . . . ah . . . call you sometime?” he said awkwardly.
Sara Conner eyed him warily. “As soon as you’ve got some work here for me to do,” she said, artfully begging the real question.
“You really are a hard case, aren’t you?” Bobby said, softening it with a smile.
“Maybe,” she said. “But then, these are hard times, aren’t they?”
Bobby quite impulsively raised her hand to his lips and gave it a quick kiss. Sara Conner yanked it back as if it had been scalded.
“What the hell was that?” she demanded angrily.
Bobby stared her down. He shrugged. “What else?” he said with a little laugh. “It just seemed to be the time for a futile gesture.”
She stared at him stonily for a long moment, but he could see the crinkles forming at the corners of her mouth, and then she couldn’t contain it anymore and favored him with a short reluctant chortle.
And so it began.
Donna Darlington: “Aren’t you afraid that all you’re going to accomplish with this so-called futile gesture is to insure the reelection of Dwayne Michaelson by pulling votes away from Carmelo?”
Nathan Wolfowitz: “You really think I’m gonna get enough votes to do that?”
Donna Darlington: “Don’t you?”
Nathan Wolfowitz: “I don’t know and I don’t care.”
Donna Darlington: “Then why are you running for Congress? Just to see yourself on television?”
Nathan Wolfowitz: “You got it, Donna! I’m here, ain’t I?”
Donna Darlington: “Just a dumb ego trip!”
Nathan Wolfowitz: “Not a dumb ego trip. Dumb is what my airhead opponents are saying.”
Donna Darlington: “And what you’re saying isn’t? That the solution to all our economic problems is to join Common Europe?”
Nathan Wolfowitz: “Anybody got a better idea? Certainly not the pinheads running against me!”
Donna Darlington: “But the Europeans hate us! And we owe them trillions of dollars!”
Nathan Wolfowitz: “So we pay them back.”
Donna Darlington: “With what?”
Nathan Wolfowitz: “You expect me to have all the answers?”
Donna Darlington: “That’s the most irresponsible thing I’ve ever heard.”
Nathan Wolfowitz: “So what? I’m not going to be elected, am I?”
Donna Darlington: “This is all a stupid stunt so you can babble your left-wing Peen-loving garbage on television!”
Nathan Wolfowitz: “Doing pretty well, ain’t I?”
—Bay Area Newsmakers,
with Donna Darlington
Little Moscow became the headquarters for Nathan Wolfowitz’s campaign. There were fund-raising parties every Friday and Saturday night, the living room was filled with desks and telephones, people kept coming and going at all hours, there were ugly jingo demonstrations outside from time to time, the poker games were canceled for the duration, the communally cooked meals were replaced by hastily gobbled junk-food take-out, there was noise at all hours that made sleep problematic, and all in all, life in the house was swiftly transformed into permanent exhausting chaos.
But Bobby didn’t mind. The first person he had called when the extra phones were put in was Sara Conner. As he had expected, she proved to be a demon of a telephone campaigner, pulling in the contributions, persuading people to register, hassling hostile voters unmercifully without letting them get a word in edgewise, who knows, even persuading a few fence sitters, if such there were, to vote for Nat, and going at it every single day after classes, from five till midnight.
Which was to say he got to share a quick meal with her during her break every night, got to listen to her talking on the phone, got to bask in her aura, and got not much else, for a solid ten days. He had never met a woman like this. When it came to politics, she was the traditional Berkeley Red and then some, but when it came to the free-and-easy sex which was just as traditional to Berkeley, she acted like some kind of anachronism out of the AIDS era before the Second Sexual Revolution.
When he gallantly offered to let her share his bed so she wouldn’t have to drag herself home to the dorms late at night, she gave him looks that would melt glass. But she continued to share her quick meals with him. On day five, when he gave her a good-bye kiss on the cheek on her way out the door, she favored him with a smile. But when he tried to kiss her on the lips the next night, she pulled away.
Bobby couldn’t understand it. She was friendly, she was quite willing to talk, she even sought him out for meals, but she continued to play the Ice Princess. Her behavior was quite beyond his experience.
He had certainly encountered his share of girls who were simply not interested. But in every way but one, Sara Conner acted as if she was interested. So why in the world was she torturing him like this?
It became something of an obsession. He lost interest in other girls. He was horny all the time. And he found himself trying to impress her in the only way that seemed possible.
He threw himself into the Wolfowitz campaign, at least when Sara Conner was in the house, taking his turn at the phones, beside her when he could manage it, stuffing envelopes, counting receipts, pep-talking the other campaign workers, writing P.R. copy, and in general working his ass off to prove his dedication to the Futile Gesture.
Weirdly enough, he found himself perversely enjoying it. Sitting there in the living room beside Sara with an aching hard-on and making phone calls. Rapping enthusiastically with campaign workers while feeling her eyes on the back of his head. Eating pizza and barbecue and hamburgers across the kitchen table from her, discussing politics and fantasizing about her enigmatic body. The sexual tension was enormously frustrating, but there was also something, well, sexy about it, energizing in some crazy way.
And despite his better judgment, he found himself actually becoming dedicated to the Wolfowitz campaign, as if the act he was putting on to impress Sara Conner had turned him into a Method Actor, as if in the process of convincing her, he had convinced himself, as if, somehow, all the political discussions he had with her while possessed of a raging hard-on had transferred all that frustrated sexual energy from his dick to his brain.
No, Wolfowitz was not going to win, the early polls gave him about 10 percent, and it was not going to get much better, but the campaign itself, the hustle and the exhaustion, the frenzy and the superheated atmosphere, even the jingo demonstrations outside the house, and the bomb threats, and the crank phone calls, and the snide media coverage, along with the feeling of taking part in some foredoomed but noble adventure, were like some kind of drug, a permanent adrenaline high.
He had missed being part of the Flag Riot. He hadn’t gotten to march behind that upside-down flag. But he was marching behind it now, and if he knew all too well that this too was going to end up being a futile gesture, the spirit of the effort was something he wouldn’t have missed for the world.
And Sara Conner’s weird behavior had given it to him. Which only made him want her more.
One morning when they happened to be having a cup of coffee alone together out on the front porch, he voiced his frustrations to Nat Wolfowitz.
Nat laughed. “The phenomenon is not unknown in the literature, kid,” Nat told him. “The technical term is ‘cock-teaser.’ ”
Bobby grimaced. “Tell me something I don’t know, Nat,” he said. “Like why is she doing this?”
Wolfowitz shrugged. “You won’t know that until you see her hole cards, you should pardon the expression,” he said.
“And when is that going to happen?”
“At the end of the game, of course. Unless you fold first, in which case, you’ll never know. Life is like poker, kid, you gotta pay to see. And that, it would seem, is what she’s making you do now.”
“Jeez, Nat, what am I supposed to do?”
Wolfowitz laughed. “These are the cards kid,” he said. “Play them, or drop out of the hand.”
Bobby sighed. “Which should I do?” he asked.
“That depends on what you’re holding,” Wolfowitz said.
“What I’m holding is my prick, Nat!” Bobby groaned.
Wolfowitz laughed again. “Seems to me you’ve already got too much in this pot to drop out now.”
“That’s the best advice the American Gorbachev has to offer?”
“Well . . . ,” Wolfowitz said slowly. “You might try a futile gesture. Think about it, kid.”
Bobby thought about it. He thought about it long and hard. Yeah, sure, try a futile gesture! But what the hell was that?
And then, on day ten, during the dinner break, when they were both in the kitchen grabbing slices of pizza, it suddenly came to him, and when it did, he realized it had been obvious all along.
What was the most futile gesture he could possibly make under the circumstances?
Turn up his hole card, of course! Come right out and tell her exactly how he felt. Then, at least, she’d have to show him her hand, and one way or another, the game would at least be over. Wolfowitz had been right all along, these after all were the cards, and if he wasn’t going to fold, he really had no alternative but to call.
“Uh, could we eat out on the porch, Sara?” he said. “There’s something I should discuss with you in private.”
“Something to do with the campaign?”
“Uh, yeah, sort of,” Bobby told her. Though not exactly the one you think, he thought.
They went out onto the rickety front porch and sat down on two old folding chairs. Across the street, a handful of pickets paraded back and forth carrying signs that read “Stick It Up Your Peen,” “Fuck Communism,” “Traitor Wolfowitz,” and “Eat Anti-Protons, Peen-lovers.” Two bored-looking cops stood at either end of the police-line sawhorses. The jingo jerks yelled across the street at Bobby and Sara for a minute or two when they first appeared, but then quickly lost interest.
It was not exactly romantic, and yet, in a certain sense . . .
“Well, what is it, Bobby?” Sara said, biting off the tip of her pizza slice.
Bobby took a deep breath, felt a hollow blossoming in his stomach, hesitated. Ah, the hell with it!
“I really want to go to bed with you, Sara,” he said. “Surely you’ve noticed.”
Sara, surprisingly enough, didn’t react at all. She didn’t even look at him. She took another bite of pizza and chewed it down slowly before she even spoke to him.
“I’ve noticed,” she finally said.
“So?” Bobby demanded.
“So what?”
“Jesus Christ!” he groaned. “So yes or no, already!”
Sara finally looked up at him, but her face was quite unreadable. “Why do you want to go to bed with me?” she said.
“Because you turn me on, damn it, why else?”
“What about me turns you on?”
“Come on, Sara, give me a break, you think this is easy?”
A ghost of a smile creased her lips. She slowly licked a glob of pizza sauce off of them with the tip of her tongue. “No,” she said. “Why should it be?”
“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you!” Bobby cried.
Sara laughed knowingly. “Aren’t you?” she said. “Haven’t you been? Don’t you have a hard-on right now?”
Bobby flushed. “Sara!”
“Answer my question and then I’ll answer yours,” Sara said. “What about me turns you on? My tits? My ass?”
“Will you be serious!”
“This is very serious to me, Bobby,” Sara said earnestly. “I want you to be honest with me. I want you to be honest with yourself. Why do you want to fuck me?”
Bobby sighed. He thought for a long moment about what he was supposed to say next, and then gave up. All right, he decided, give her what she wants, speak straight from the heart.
“The way you dress, I don’t even know what your tits and ass look like, so it can’t be your fantastic body, I guess,” he said. “Maybe it’s your eyes, I mean, there’s something there that . . .” He threw up his hands in exasperation. “I don’t know how to say any of this right,” he admitted. “I just feel different around you, you know, I act different, I think different, I’m a different person somehow. . . .”
Sara smiled at him softly. “Do you like it?” she said quietly.
“Of course I like it!” Bobby snapped. “But I can’t say I’m too entranced with what’s going on now!”
Sara laughed, then grew suddenly serious. “Are you in love with me?” she said.
Bobby sat there transfixed. No one had ever asked him that before. “Are you in love with me?” was all he could manage to say.
“I asked first.”
Bobby shrugged. He sighed. He looked down at his shoe tops. “I’ve never been in love with anyone before,” he muttered, “so how the hell should I know if that’s what I’m feeling?”
“Me too,” Sara said, and broke into a smile that was positively radiant.
“So?” Bobby said.
“So I guess after we get off tonight, we’d better find out,” she told him. And she leaned over, pressed her lips against his, and opened her mouth. The pickets across the street hooted and jeered. He could taste the pizza on her tongue. But none of that mattered. Somehow, it only served to make the moment sweeter.
Far out in Berkeley, long known for leftist loonies, comic candidate Nathan Wolfowitz is getting laughs with his independent campaign for Congress. Wolfowitz, a UC Berkeley assistant professor of history and notorious card shark, advocates American entry into Common Europe and openly admits that his campaign is primarily financed by poker winnings.
“Why not?” declares the self-styled American Gorbachev. “At least I’m not dealing marked cards from the bottom of the deck, which is more than you can say for what the Democrats and Republicans are doing to the American people!”
—Time, “People”
They went up to Bobby’s room at 12:30. Bobby had been fantasizing about this moment endlessly, but now that it had finally come, he found his mind quite empty when it came to an opening move. They sat down on the edge of the bed together awkwardly, not touching, not saying anything, just staring at each other for what seemed like an agonizing eternity.
“This is weird . . . ,” Bobby finally managed to say.
“Uh-huh. . . .”
“So . . . ?”
“So . . . ?”
And then, somehow, all at once they were in each other’s arms and kissing, and once that finally managed to happen, it was another world. They rolled each other around the bed, and groped each other clumsily, and fumbled with their clothing, all the while keeping their mouths tightly locked, tasting each other’s tongues, hot, and awkward, and not at all fastidious in the sudden release of all the endlessly prolonged sexual tension between them.
Somehow, they managed to get their clothes off without breaking the long, long kiss, and then, at long, long last, Bobby lay naked in his bed atop the naked body of Sara Conner.
He propped himself up on his hands and took a long look at what was now finally revealed. Her ribs showed a little beneath small breasts with large, erect pink nipples. Her pubic hair was black and thin, and there was a small mole just to the southeast of her belly button.
In truth, it was a rather ordinary female body, and Bobby had seen much better, but, in that moment, under the circumstances, the sight was nevertheless magic.
He kissed her on the belly, deep inside each thigh, he sucked on one nipple, then the other, gave her a long kiss on the mouth, and then slipped his prick easily inside her.
It had been simple and basic up until that moment, but then it became something quite unlike anything he had experienced before. As he fucked her, Sara stared straight into his eyes, moaning, and sighing, but hardly blinking, and finally, when he had built her up to a peak, she took his head in her hands, and pulled him down into an open-mouthed kiss, so that when she bucked, and screamed, and came, she breathed her orgasm, her spirit, her essence, deep inside him.
And then, a moment later, with her hands kneading his balls, she broke the kiss, and he found himself looking deep, deep, deep, into her green eyes as he came, and when he did, she smiled, and ran her tongue slowly across her lips, and kissed him ever so gently in the moment afterward.
“So?” she said with a contented sigh.
“So . . . ?” he answered.
“So is this the beginning of a meaningful relationship?”
Bobby rolled off of her and snuggled her into the crook of his arm. He leaned over and kissed her tenderly on the lips. “Could be,” he said. “Tell you one thing, it certainly wasn’t any futile gesture.”
Billy Allen: “And why do you call yourself the American Gorbachev?”
Nathan Wolfowitz: “Because he’s my hero. He took a country that had had a terminal case of economic and political constipation for seventy years, held his nose, and gave it the enema it so desperately needed. Sound familiar, Billy?”
Billy Allen: “Please! We’re on national television!”
Nathan Wolfowitz: “And so are the atrocities we’re committing every day in Latin America, Billy—seen any good neuronic disrupter footage lately?”
Billy Allen: “Roll the damn commercial!”
—Newspeak, with Billy Allen
Nathan Wolfowitz’s Congressional campaign did turn out to be a Futile Gesture, as promised, though the Election Night party at Little Moscow was hardly a wake. For once, the drinks and the food were on Wolfowitz, not the guests—residents and campaign workers only.
Sara Conner was more or less both by that time; she hadn’t exactly moved all of her stuff into Bobby’s room, but she did stay over every night after the campaign work was over, and she had moved in three or four changes of clothes, as well as her computer.
The phones and the desks had been removed from the living room, and everyone gathered around the videowall to watch the returns. Even though the outcome was never in doubt, Wolfowitz waited till after midnight before making his formal statement.
By then, 98 percent of the precincts were in, and the final numbers would not vary by more than a percentage point or two at most. Michaelson, the Republican, had won with 48 percent of the vote. Carmelo, the Democrat, got 39 percent. Wolfowitz finished way behind with 13 percent.
“Well, at least we prevented the bastard from getting an absolute majority,” Sara said to Bobby as they sat there on the couch holding hands and watching the inevitable. “Not too bad for a futile gesture.”
“And maybe cost Carmelo the election . . . ,” Bobby muttered.
“So what? It’s all the same anyway. At least we gave them something to think about.”
Nathan Wolfowitz got up from his armchair and turned off the videowall. He stood there for a moment, letting everyone wait to hear his words of wisdom. The room fell silent. Everyone sat there feeling washed out and somber.
“Well, it’s all over but the shouting, isn’t it?” Wolfowitz finally said. He spread his arms. He threw back his head. “Aaargh!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. “Okay, kids,” he said, “now it’s over. Anyone for poker?”
“Jesus, Nat, is that all you’ve got to say?” someone shouted.
Wolfowitz shrugged. “We anted up, we played the cards, we lost the hand,” he said. “What else is there to say?”
“You gonna run again next time, Nat?” someone else shouted.
“For Congress?” Wolfowitz said. “Forget it. The next election is a Presidential year, right? So let me be the first to announce my candidacy for President of the United States.”
There was a good round of laughter.
“No, I’m serious,” Wolfowitz declared. “Dead serious.”
“Sure you are, Nat!”
“Think about it,” Wolfowitz said. “We just passed the hat around this time and financed the whole thing out of that and my poker winnings. And we still managed a few sound bites on the national news, didn’t we? Shit, I even got five minutes on the goddamn Billy Allen show before they pulled the plug! Well, there’s the possibility of federal matching funds in a Presidential race. Who knows, with a little trick accounting, next time I might even be able to campaign at a profit. Running for the Presidential nomination could be a whole new career. Beats trying to teach history to assholes, anyway, don’t it?”
“Yeah, which nomination, Nat?”
Wolfowitz shrugged. “Does it matter?” He fished a Ronald Reagan ten-dollar piece out of his pocket. “Tails, I’m a Democrat, heads I’m a Republican,” he said, flipping the coin high in the air and catching it with a slap of his palms.
“Well, fuck a duck,” he said when he looked at it, “I guess I’ve just become a Republican! Now come on, this campaign has just about cleaned me out, so let’s play some poker, suckers!”
Bobby didn’t join the poker game. Instead, he went out into the backyard with Sara. They stood there holding hands amid the garbage cans and cardboard boxes full of old computer printouts and assorted campaign detritus.
“Well, it’s over,” Bobby said.
“The campaign, you mean?”
“Yeah. It was something, wasn’t it?”
“Uh-huh.”
By now Bobby knew her well enough to know that he was going to have to say it. “But it is over,” he muttered. “I guess you’ll be moving back to the dorms now. . . .”
Sara turned to face him. By now her eyes were quite readable, and what Bobby saw there sent his spirit soaring. “Is that what you want?” she said.
“You know it isn’t.”
“So?” she said, looking down at her feet and kicking one sneaker with the other.
“So . . .”
“Say it, Bobby. . . .”
Bobby found himself staring at his own feet. “So I love you, Sara Conner,” he said, “and I’ve never said that to anyone before. Stay here with me.”
Sara reached out, took his chin in her hand, lifted his head, and kissed him. “I thought you’d never ask,” she said dryly.
Bobby laughed. “No you didn’t,” he said.
Sara laughed back at him. Her eyes seemed to sparkle. “I guess ya got me,” she said.
“I guess I do. . . .”
“So?”
“So . . . ,” Bobby said, and hugged her to him.